Rotundus.com

in the wake of the most recent Olympics I've bumped into a bunch of articles like this one asserting that women

... dominated the U.S. team in every way: More women than men made the American team, and they won far more gold medals than the American men.

There was also that one female swimmer, Ye Shiwen, about whom headlines claimed that Ryan Lochte may be speedy...but this 16-year-old Chinese girl is even quicker!, that the Chinese 16-year-old swam faster than Ryan Lochte and that she was faster than any man. That must mean, to quote The Friendly Athiest from a post on gender testing of women that:

... Women are capable of outstanding athletic performance, but it today’s society that is something that is strictly relegated to the boys’ club. Until the Olympic committee and the general public can get it into their heads that women are also capable of extraordinary athletic feats, female athletes are going to continue to have to put up with these ridiculous double standards.

It seems fairly reasonable to ask then just how well male and female athletes performed - as apparently it's only the evil patriarchy holding women back (despite the Chinese government doing things that might qualify as child abuse in an attempt to get maximum performance out of its female [and male] athletes). How did "Faster than any man" Ye Shiwen fair against her male counterparts at the olympics? Looks up the results for the men's and women's events and compare the results. Turns out she beat Lochte by a whopping negative 23 seconds and the slowest man by negative 14 seconds. (This despite Ye Shiwen shattering the women's record by more than a second and Ryan Lochte not setting a World or Olympic record).

So maybe despite the Chinese investment in female athletes for the Olympics they can compete on other fields like the track. To test that hypothesis compare what some male athletes achieve versus the women's world record (officially 10.49 seconds, although in reality it's probably 10.61 seconds due to a faulty wind gauge recording that official world record). To compare I decided to look up men's high school athletics and see what I could find in the way of results. The first result I came across was simply for the senior boys 100 metre dash at a Toronto area track meet. How'd the winner there fair? 10.31 seconds. In other words a high school boy at a regional event in Canada can outdo the world's fastest woman in that event.

Going back to the Friendly Atheist's comments, he also said:

... Has anyone ever asked Kobe if he’s actually a man? How about Lance Armstrong? Brett Favre? It would seem that it is usually the “fairer sex” that is placed under this kind of gender scrutiny.

The answer seems simple. Given the differences in performance, some definition of "woman" seems inevitable. Verification might be necessary to enforce that given that men seem willing to run in (and win) races aimed at women. Where legally required to a let a boy play on a girl's team if no corresponding boy's team exists, there seems to be a need to develop what basically seems to be excuses to get them off the team.

The testing question doesn't seem to apply to men in the same way though. Given that the NBA doesn't appear to ban women from competing, whether Kobe [Bryant] is male or not doesn't seem to have the same relevance. The case of Brett Favre also is irrelevant given that the NFL also doesn't prohibit women from playing. The Tour de France seems to have a separate but shorter women's event rather than allowing women to compete in the men's race, but I suspect that even if the Tour de France dropped the restriction women still wouldn't be showing up on the winner's platform (unless they create a female winner category for the race which would reintroduce a slightly different version of the same problem).

If you want to argue that "man" and "woman" are artificial categories then it would seem that the only coherent way forward would be to eliminate gender distinctions in the Olympics. However, though the US women's olympic team was described as dominant over their male counterparts, if computing under such rules they'd likely be deprived of almost all medals.

Are Drug Companies Faking an Innovation Crisis? Uh, No.

"Light and Lexchin’s article makes much of Bernard Munos’ work ... which shows a relatively constant rate of new drug discovery. They should go back and look at his graph, because they might notice that the slope of the line in recent years has not kept up with the historical rate. And they completely leave out one of the other key points that Munos makes: that even if the rate of discovery had remained linear, the costs associated with it sure as hell haven’t. ... the pharma industry has been laying off thousands of people in recent years [and] the stocks of most of the publicly traded companies haven’t been very strong investments ... Drug companies are certainly not consistent angels, but neither are they devils"

U.K. threatens to revoke Ecuador’s status if Assange granted asylum

This seems like a particularly stupid idea, one likely to backfire on some British embassies in less welcoming parts of the world.

Driver swerves to avoid moose, hits bear instead

Perhaps the moose was doublely-lucky here? Would it have been the bear's dinner otherwise with the two being in such close proximity?

eBay Terms of Service Update: Category, Item Specifics and Catalog Updates

"The following items are also being added to the prohibited items list: advice; spells; curses; hexing; conjuring; magic; prayers; blessing services; magic potions; healing sessions; work from home businesses & information; wholesale lists, and drop shop lists." Where can I go to buy them now?

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Wilson supports efforts to destigmatize atheism, like the running feature "Why I Am an Atheist" on Pharyngula, and said so in his anti-Dawkins posts. Atran believes that "attacking obscurantic, cruel, lunatic ideas is always a good idea." It's proclaiming that religion is rotten to the core that they think is misguided.

That includes laying the blame for much of human conflict at the feet of the faithful. In a recent Science article, Atran and Jeremy Ginges, an associate professor of psychology at the New School, cite evidence suggesting that "only a small minority of recorded wars" have been mainly motivated by religious disputes (though making distinctions between religious and political causes is notoriously knotty). They complain in the article that the New Atheists are quick to remind everyone how fundamentalism fuels Al Qaeda but neglect to mention the role of churches in the civil-rights movement. The New Atheists are, according to Atran and Ginges, cherry-picking the horrors. "Science produced a nuclear bomb. Therefore we should throw away science," says Atran, to illustrate the baby-bathwater logic. "Sometimes it can be really noxious, and other times it can be quite helpful."

See also another recent article in Foreign Policy subtitled "What we don't understand about religion just might kill us.":

Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored "God and War" audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history's most lethal century of international bloodshed.

Spanish mayor robs supermarkets

"A Spanish mayor who became a cult hero for staging robberies at supermarkets and giving stolen groceries to the poor sets off this week on a three-week march that could embarrass the government and energise anti-austerity campaigners."

Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera's Free Online Courses

"Students taking free online courses offered by the startup company Coursera have reported dozens of incidents of plagiarism... This week a professor leading one of the so-called Massive Open Online Courses posted a plea to his 39,000 students to stop plagiarizing, and Coursera's leaders say they will review the issue and consider adding plagiarism-detection software in the future." - humanities seems to be where this is most commonly being detected. I'm guessing part of the issue is that an unaccredited certificate is still a certificate, particularly if the place issuing it is somewhat well-known.

Conscientious consumption and culture war

The author on the Chick-Fil-A situation: "It's my view that this sort of skirmish in the culture wars is an inevitable consequence of trends in 'ethical consumption' and 'corporate social responsibility'. Conservatives sceptical of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement have often charged that CSR is a stalking horse for liberal causes that have failed to get traction through ordinary political channels. ... Ian Reifowitz, writing in the Huffington Post, finds it 'troubling' that Chick-fil-A prefers Christians as franchise owners, but rightly sees that the source of his unease when generalised may complicate CSR-like corporate policies"

Students guilty of disrupting speech in 'Irvine 11' case

"Ten Muslim students get three years of probation for disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador at UC Irvine." Am I the only one who finds cases such as these (which as far as I've heard are more or less par for the course for Israelis in Canada) really only hurt the protester's cause?